Spruiking InDesign since 1999

Author Archive: adobe

XML is a beautiful thing…primarily for geeky people who are passionate about topics like workflow automation and industrial strength publishing solutions. Being able to describe document geometry and document content in a non-binary file format that can be edited and manipulated by databases, scripts, and other processes enables a vast universe of vertical market solutions that can save publishers a lot of time and money, as well as offer opportunities for new types of publishing products.

Adobe InDesign CS4 contains a couple of powerful enhancements to Paragraph Styles. In addition to Nested Styles, CS4 enables you to apply character level styling on a line-by-line basis within a paragraph, or using GREP to identify and style runs of text. For example, you can use a GREP Style to automatically italicize any URL that appears in your text.

Have you ever had to design a brochure or other marketing document, and then been tormented by the task of setting up your document correctly to account for the folding required to complete the piece?

There’s a new product available now from FoldRite that’s designed to take the worry and hassle out of setting up different types of folded documents in InDesign. I played with it a bit the other day, and I found it to be both a valuable and easy to use utility. If you create folded printed pieces, you’ll definitely want to have a look at this one, because it just might eliminate a lot of headaches for you.

Based on what we’re seeing in our incoming crash logs, it appears that 10.5.4 has solved the NavServices crash problems.

We’re also noticing, however, that some users are still hitting a problem that was introduced by a VersionCue 3.1 update last year. For a subset of users, the update did not install the VersionCueUI framework. As a result, when invoking a NavServices dialog (i.e., place, relink, save as, etc.), they will crash–not because of a Leopard problem, but because their VersionCueUI framework was not updated.

Apple’s 10.5.4 update contains more fixes for the Nav Services crash problem that manifests itself most frequently in InDesign. It also contains a fix for the file corruption problem that occurs when saving files to a remote server.

I was just in Auckland, New Zealand, for the InDesign Conference put on there by Mogo Media. David Blatner, Sandee Cohen, Mike McHugh, Michael Stoddart and myself had the privilege of participating in the three days worth of sessions on using InDesign and Creative Suite. Big kudos to Mogo and Martinho da Gloria for putting the event together. It was moko-riffic, and I learned what “jafa” means while I was there. Thank you Fraser.

Publishing consultant Martinho Da Gloria (creator of the wonderfully useful Layout Zone script add-on for InDesign) has made another free script available for InDesign users: SelectionToPDF. As the name would lead one to believe, the script enables you to select one or more object in InDesign, and export just that selection to a PDF file, not the whole page on which it lives. Cari Jansen has a good blog post on the script with step-by-step instructions and screen shots.